San Francisco — March 5, 2019 –Databricks, the leader in Unified Analytics and founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, today announced keynote speakers and several new event features for this year’s Spark + AI Summit conference taking place in San Francisco from April 23-25, 2019. Spark + AI Summit is the leading event for data teams, including developers, data scientists, and data and analytics leaders, to engage in discussions regarding data, analytics, machine learning and practical applications of artificial intelligence (AI).

The keynotes, sessions and training at this conference will cover data engineering and data science content along with best practices for productionizing AI. Attendees will learn about the latest advances in Apache Spark and machine learning technologies like TensorFlow, MLflow, PyTorch as well as real-world enterprise AI best practice. To lead discussions on innovations in AI, the Spark + AI Summit speaker lineup includes presentations from data and machine learning thought leaders, researchers and the original creators of Apache Spark and MLflow.

The comprehensive list of keynote speakers are:

David Patterson, Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley and Turing Award winner

Jitendra Malik, Director at Facebook AI Research, Professor of EECS at University of California at Berkeley and pioneer in machine learning and computer vision

Jan Neumann, Senior Director of Applied AI Research for Comcast

Caitlin Smallwood, Vice President of Data Science and Analytics at Netflix

Timnit Gebru, Data Researcher at Stanford

Databricks co-founders and original creators of Apache Spark keynotes include:

Reynold Xin, Chief Architect and co-founder at Databricks

Matei Zaharia, Chief Technologist and co-founder at Databricks

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder at Databricks

The Summit begins with several one-day training and certification workshops, which include a mix of instruction and hands-on exercises. In addition to providing Apache Spark training, this year’s Summit includes training on MLflow and Databricks Delta. Offering more hands-on experiences for developers, this year’s Summit will feature a Developer Hub to connect with Databricks customers and resident solutions architects and networking in the designated Developer Lounge. The Summit will also host events for specialized industries, including Healthcare and Life Sciences, Financial Technology, and groups including Women in Unified Analytics.

“This year’s Summit is laser-focused on showcasing innovations in AI technology and practical use cases, while creating opportunities for more technical conversations among peers,” said Ali Ghodsi. “We are seeing more diversity in the Summit attendees spanning developers and data scientists so the content and experiences will create opportunities for these two teams to better collaborate and develop solutions for data problems. Since the inception of Apache Spark – the original unified analytics engine – we as a community have been driving innovations to make AI achievable. We’re looking forward to hosting the greatest minds in AI and continued innovation.”

More than 5,000 attendees at the Spark + AI Summit will attend three days of training sessions, presentations and networking events. This year’s event will take place at the Moscone West Convention Center and include more than 160 talks. Key themes for this year’s Spark + AI Summit include real-world AI use cases, the latest in deep learning frameworks and Apache Spark integration, best practices for productionizing machine learning models, and how to use Apache Spark at scale.

Databricks’ mission is to accelerate innovation for its customers by unifying Data Science, Engineering and Business. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark, Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform for data science teams to collaborate with data engineering and lines of business to build data products. Users achieve faster time-to-value with Databricks by creating analytic workflows that go from ETL and interactive exploration to production. The company also makes it easier for its users to focus on their data by providing a fully managed, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure that reduces operational complexity and total cost of ownership. Databricks has secured investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Microsoft, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Battery Ventures, Green Bay Ventures, and Geodesic, among others, and has a global customer base that includes Viacom, Shell and HP.

Apache, Apache Spark and Spark are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation.